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Leading B.C. economist Helmut Pastrick addresses a crowd of local business leaders during the kick off of Sarnia-Lambton Business Week Tuesday. He anticipates Sarnia-Lambton will continue to see slow economic growth over the next few years. (Barbara Simpson/Sarnia Observer/Postmedia Network)

Sarnia-Lambton can expect to see slow economic growth over the next few years barring a magic bullet like a new refinery landing in the community, says a leading B.C. economist.

“It's going to be tough to turn things around, short a new company coming in or a new industry,” said Helmut Pastrick, chief economist of Central 1 Credit Union.

In a seven-year span, Sarnia-Lambton has lost 23 manufacturing sites – eight of those from the chemical industry – following the global recession, according to Statistics Canada data.

“This is a trend provincially and nationally,” Pastrick said, citing a variety of factors like trade agreements and globalization for the loss of manufacturing operations.

Pastrick delivered the bleak but realistic local economic outlook to kick off Sarnia-Lambton Business Week Tuesday.

About 55 business and community leaders attended the event, held at the Best Western Guildwood Inn, to hear from the top economist of a Vancouver-based credit union.

Three credit unions – Libro, Mainstreet and Southwest Regional – partnered to bring Pastrick in for the event.

For local business leader Don Anderson, Pastrick's economic forecast for Sarnia-Lambton didn't come as a surprise.

“It just reaffirms we need to do something about it,” said Anderson, who is executive director of the Sarnia-Lambton Business Development Corporation.

And for Pastrick, the solution may lie in the community finding new spinoff opportunities from Sarnia-Lambton's petrochemical and industrial manufacturing sectors.

“To have a brand new industry come here is not going to happen,” he said. “It's not going to be Silicon Valley of the North.”

He welcomed efforts like the creation of a local bio-industrial sector – which builds on local petrochemical and agricultural expertise – and plans to create an oversized load corridor to reduce transportation costs for local industrial manufacturers interested in export opportunities.

Anderson said his advice for local entrepreneurs – many of which turn to his agency for help in business plan development – is to consider global exporting opportunities.

He said an oversized load corridor will help a lot of industrial manufacturers, but he pointed out the project will need the support of all partners – including senior levels of government and the manufacturers themselves – for it to come to fruition.

“We've got world-class manufacturers,” he said. “We need to get them selling to the world.”

Pastrick also forecasted Tuesday that the global economy will remain “sluggish” into 2018, with the U.S. still struggling to rebound following the recession.